“There’s just something about the concentration of them, the completeness of the experience,” says Jon Spaihts, explaining his enduring love for feature films in an era dominated by prestige television. The screenwriter behind Dune, Prometheus, and Passengers speaks with the conviction of someone who has spent a lifetime studying the architecture of stories.
“I wanted to be a storyteller pretty much as long as I can remember,” Spaihts recalls. “When I was a kid, and I figured out that books were written by people, I was like, ‘Oh, I will also write books.'” That childhood certainty evolved through various forms – from literary fiction to documentary videos – before landing firmly in screenwriting.
Jon Spaihts. Photo by Johanna Watts
When Denis Villeneuve called about adapting Frank Herbert’s Dune, Spaihts was actually preparing to step away from screenwriting to direct his first film. “I know you said ‘No new jobs,'” his agent told him, “but Denis Villeneuve is calling about Dune.” His response was immediate, “Get me in the room as soon as possible.”
Collaboration with Denis Villeneuve
The urgency was warranted as the production timeline demanded a first draft in just seven weeks. For Spaihts, a lifelong Dune fan who had “read and reread and reread” the novel, this impossible timeline suddenly seemed achievable, particularly because Villeneuve had already made the crucial decision to split the book into two films.
“There was a kind of script, but it was up on blocks,” Spaihts explains about the early development process. “There were cleared chunks of it that were older material, and chunks of it were clearly Denis – you’d hear the French accent in the writing… you’d see the visual invention. There were places where it’s very clear that Denis was having bold and strong visual instincts about sequences in the film.”
After delivering his first draft, Spaihts and Villeneuve “entered into an iterative collaborative process that was very, very tight.” They worked closely to preserve Villeneuve’s visual inventions while ensuring the adaptation remained faithful to Herbert’s core themes.
“I just totally physically destroyed a copy of Dune,” Spaihts says of his analytical approach to adaptation. “I went through with a highlighter, red paper, dog-eared pages to anatomize it. I needed to understand how it worked.” This forensic examination revealed surprising insights about Herbert’s writing style that even Spaihts, despite his intimate knowledge of the text, had never noticed.
His process involved creating extensive spreadsheets breaking down every scene, analyzing the novel’s structure, and mapping out crucial character moments. “I made a big table in Excel and Word, and I just broke down scene by scene the entire first half of the novel,” he explains. This detailed analysis helped him identify the novel’s theatrical nature and the challenges it presented for adaptation.
Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
“What you don’t realize reading the book is that many key scenes all take place in the same room,” he explains. “Frank Herbert was a great lover of ideas, but while he was inventive about action, it was not where his love in storytelling lay.” Often, major action sequences happened off-page, requiring Spaihts to envision new ways to bring these moments to life visually while maintaining Herbert’s philosophical depth.
Refusing to Be Fired
Throughout his career, Spaihts has maintained an unusual approach to the typical Hollywood practice of replacing writers: he sometimes refuses to be fired. “I’ve gotten that terrible phone call when you’re on a project… and I’ve said, ‘Well, no, that’s silly. I’m a writer, not a story. If they want to tell it a different way, let’s talk about the way they’d like to tell it.'”
This boldness extends to pitch meetings. When producers present adaptation possibilities, Spaihts often redirects the conversation. “Let’s talk about what you want. Do you really need to move one of these comic books or just want a good story?” This approach has consistently helped him maintain creative control and build stronger relationships with collaborators. The other element that helped him was speed.
“Coming to town, I had to learn to write faster,” Spaihts explains, describing his evolution as a writer. The key insight came from understanding the essential economy of film storytelling, “A movie is pretty small as a storytelling document. It’s a tiny fraction of a novel. Movies are lean and mean, and the most important thing to writing fast is learning how much work not to do.”
Florence Pugh (Princess Irulan. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures
This efficiency became crucial when adapting Dune. “While there’s easily enough material to fill the runtime of three movies, structurally, it doesn’t naturally split into three pieces,” he notes. The first half of the book was particularly “movie-ready” with its clear dramatic unity, contained timeline, and escalating tension leading to the Harkonnen invasion.
The Quest for Perfection
Despite television’s current golden age, Spaihts remains passionately committed to feature films. “TV can be so big and it’s gotten so good,” he acknowledges, “but even the best TV shows tend to have soft spots. Even the best series you’ve ever seen, there’s a weak season, there are some dodgy episodes.”
In contrast, he sees movies as having the potential for absolute perfection. “An army of people spending millions of dollars and years of their time on this two hours of story. A movie can be perfect.” This pursuit of perfection drives his approach to screenwriting, pushing him to find the most efficient and impactful way to tell a story.
“There’s a dangerous addiction in TV now,” he explains, “where the ‘cliffhangeriness’ of it is the driving imperative. Everything is written to make you feel unsatisfied and need to get to the next one. They have that crack-like need for the next hit. And I believe in my bones that stories should satisfy.”
When asked about perfect films, he points to Lawrence of Arabia, Dunkirk, and Persona. “I think they are the most sublime jewels in the firmament of storytelling,” he asserts. “They represent what their directors and writers wanted, what the artists who made them were going for. They got it done. I think I could probably fill a few sheets of paper with the titles of films that I think are basically flawless.”
For Spaihts, these works exemplify the unique power of cinema to achieve a complete, satisfying artistic vision in a way that other mediums rarely can.
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
